Unreal Engine 4 Is Now Free

jones_supa writes In 2014, Epic Games took the step of making Unreal Engine 4 available to everyone by subscription for $19 per month. Today, this general-purpose game engine is available to everyone for free. This includes future updates, the full C++ source code of the engine, documentation, and all sorts of bonus material. You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. The business scheme that Epic set in the beginning, remains the same: when you ship a commercial game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. Epic strived to create a simple and fair arrangement in which they succeed only when your product succeeds.

Comments

Re:Why?

[Guspaz]

A handful of engines (mostly UE4) are used for the vast majority of *all* games. What does Unreal Tournament have to do with it? Some UE4 games aren't even first-person, some are things like RTS.

But is it "free software"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is it still freedom-disrespecting software?

Re:But is it "free software"?

[rogoshen1]

go home Stalman, you're drunk.

Re:But is it "free software"?

[davydagger]

terms are pretty fair actually.

Re:But is it "free software"?

[stonefoz]

Of all the things that benefit from being free software, games aren't entirely gaining. A game with source code include all the "spoilers". Part of the magic of a new game is exploring, not drudging though code (an entirely different game). If there is anything given less criticism, let it be games. Sometime it's entertaining to be surprised. That is a games intended purpose, to entertain.

Re:But is it "free software"?

[rogoshen1]

Oh, I respect his viewpoint -- he's a net good for the world -- however he's also kind of a crank.

To be clear though, it was that zealotry, attacking any piece of software that isn't under a license such as the GPL that I was poking fun at. I think it's naive to think that we'd be where we are now if literally everything was 'free' via something similar to a GPL license.

It's a lot like that APK guy, I use his host file. But I'll still poke fun at him coming out of the blue to spam the shit out of a thread.

PS: I feel like a dunce for misspelling his name.

Thank you Epic

[EmperorOfCanada]

Thanks epic. I literally just started re-coding my game from Cocos2d to Unreal. My only regret is not doing this sooner; once I saw how well this worked with mac and the clean C++ just wow.

Re:Thank you Epic

[jbssm]

I literally just started re-coding my game from Cocos2d to Unreal

Can you share some experiences with us. What did disappoint you in Cocos2d and what did you find appealing in Unreal Engine?

I'm about to start developing a 2D game (mostly for fun tough) and I was quite indecisive between Godot and Cocos2d... now I'm indecisive between Godot, Cocos2d, and Unreal Engine. The more choices the more I stall this...

Re:Thank you Epic

[EmperorOfCanada]

Already a few disappointments. One is that the installed app is around 250Mb for what is effectively hello world. Also the whole environment is slow as molasses and I have a mac pro 2013. On the good side I think that I could develop just about anything that popped into my head. I am a bit worried about this being one of those silver bullets where the normal parts are developed so quickly that the project is seemingly 90% done in no time but the fiddly bits then take 10x as long. One other thing is that I like to release my iOS apps going back to iOS 5.1.1

I love cocos2dx but I am starting to balk at the 2d part. They are introducing 3D so that is good. The documentation for cocos2d is sparse. The executables are small and the startup delay isn't too bad. It is 64 bit for IOS (critical). Very multi-platform (Win, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and I think mobile windows). Their release schedule is very fast. Also the C++ is pretty close to the bone which means that the project sort of marches forward at a steady pace including the fiddly bits.

I recently played with Gameplay3d and was actually quite impressed. Very simple and it just sort of works. The only huge thing was that importing assets in from something like Maya was cumbersome and sort of sucked. The documentation is nearly nonexistent (documentation with useful examples) their sample code was trying to show off how they were such efficient coders and didn't separate out each bit of functionality.

The platform that attracts me the most is Openframeworks. Except that they don't yet do 64 bit on iOS which is a show stopper. They are promising this with their 0.9.0 release.

But I might have spoken too soon. I am going to continue now with cocos2d and probably deploy version 1 of my present project in that. But I am going to spend an hour an evening seeing how hard I can push Unreal.

What worries me is that with Unreal I might alter my game to fit their environment which might make for a very beautiful game that isn't much fun instead of the ugly game that I make that is fun.

Re:Thank you Epic

[odie5533]

The experience using the development environment of Unity/Godot/Unreal is completely different than Cocos2d. Coding in Cocos2d requires you constantly be reading docs, hunting across the net for examples because the docs are horrendously incomplete and outdated, and doing all the coding and asset management by hand. There is a studio editor for Cocos2d, but it is difficult to use and the documentation for it is limited. I never managed to get it to work. Part of the problem is that much of the development of Cocos2d takes place in Asia, so the docs need to be translated to English. By the time this happens, they no longer represent the current state of the library.

If you try making a simple loading screen and short game in Cocos2d compared to Unity/Unreal/Godot, you will instantly see how very different the two are. The learning curve for Unity-like development is really low. You can start on your game immediately and learn as you go. Cocos2d has a huge upfront learning requirement, and it's hard to pass because of the state of the docs. Frankly, I'm surprised at how many games are made in Cocos2d given the other offerings that are available which include a strong development environment. The biggest pluses to Cocos2d to me are that it's 100% free and that it has great crossplatform capabilities. But when you consider how much more difficult it is to use, and the fact that your game is unlikely to ever make money or cross the royalty threshold, you probably should be using an easier tool that is more popular and might lead to job opportunities. A lot of great engines are offering a free-to-start-with option: Unity, Unreal, Marmalade, Corona, GameMaker, Shiva, Stencyl, Construct2. Many of these didn't use to have a free option other than a 30-day trial.

Re:Why?

[Opportunist]

I don't know. Why don't you ask the makers of these games.

Oh look. They ain't UT clones. There's a RTS. There is a survival horror game (ok, this now almost forces the "and how many survival horror games..." question). And I think over there's an Adventure game. There's a racing game in there too, go, try to find it!

For the Law Nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/391/244/case.html

United Shoe Machinery got broken up under the Sherman Antitrust act, because they dominated the market (90%+) for shoe-making machines. Also, they had a pricing scheme that charged more when your company produced more shoes - so they made the real bank on the big manufacturers, but they were cheap enough for the little guy that other manufacturers of shoe machines couldn't get a foothold.

In other words, they succeeded only when their customers succeeded. Sound familiar?

(For the record, you couldn't actually break up Epic using this argument, for at least 3 reasons: (1 - factual) the Unreal Engine has nowhere near that market dominance that USM did in its heyday, (2 - political) the judiciary these days is way more pro-business, and (3 - appeal to justice) the decision in US v. USM was actually bullshit and should never have been decided that way. I'll leave (3) as an exercise for the reader.)

5% Gross is a terrible deal

[entertainment]

5% on Gross Revenue is horrible. When you look at advertising costs pretty much outstripping development costs 5% is a big chunk.

Re:5% Gross is a terrible deal

[drinkypoo]

That's why Notch wrote his own engine for Minecraft and sold Mojang for $2.5 billion.

Oh wait ... maybe success is not only a factor of the engine, but _gameplay_.

You left out the really critical part of your argument, which is that Notch wrote a shitty new engine, and still made billions. It wasn't even a competent job.

Re:Okay Ms Sarkeesian, your turn at bat

[Gliscameria]

I think some people may not like it because now there's less of an excuse to have a crappy game. I think it's great. Let's raise the bar and purge some of the garbage.

Re:How do they know they're getting paid fairly?

[Kjella]

EULA

6. Records and Audits

You agree to keep accurate books and records related to your development, manufacture, Distribution, and sale of Products and related revenue. Epic may conduct reasonable audits of those books and records. Audits will be conducted during business hours on reasonable prior notice to you. Epic will bear the costs of audits unless the results show a shortfall in payments in excess of 5% during the period audited, in which case you will be responsible for the cost of the audit.

Software Corp uses brain when licensing ...

[Qbertino]

Software Corp continues to use brain when licensing its software, remains perpetually popular. What a concept. These guys deserve our respect. I remember buying Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, one of those rare games that acutally shipped with a Linux binary back in those days.

You guys are Epic! (pun intended)

Re:5% on gross is absurdly high

[gnupun]

If 5% seems high, what about the 30% cut that Apple and Google take on games in iOS and Android? Unreal seems to be following ios and android, and before that, Playstation -- charging a percentage of sales as "platform" fees.

Reasonable

[phorm]

You know, that is one of the most reasonable clauses I've seen in a very long time.

Basically, we expect you to make decent efforts at bookkeeping. If we think you're shafting you, we'll pay for the audit, unless you really are shafting us in which case you pay for the audit and the licensing-related costs.

Re: Not a great start

[Andy Smith]

It's not a bug, it's the installer's documentation that's wrong. I found the correct instructions on a forum and the install now appears to be working.

You have to click on "Library", then add engines, select the latest version and click install.

You can distribute source ...

[perpenso]

IANAL, but it looks like distributing the source code to "end users" of a compiled program is not allowed

Untrue. I am also not a lawyer and I only skimmed the agreement so perhaps I am misunderstanding it but I believe you can distribute the source code to your game.

What you cannot distribute is Epic's game engine source code and binary tools. However your customer can download these at no charge from Epic just like you did. So it seems a customer can get everything they need to rebuild the game themselves. They just need to download game code from you and engine code/tools from Epic.

Re:fair?

[Barefoot Monkey]

What if my project requires custom licensing terms?

If you require terms that reduce or eliminate the 5% royalty in exchange for an upfront fee, or if you need custom legal terms or dedicated Epic support to help your team reduce risk or achieve specific goals, we’re here to help. See the custom licensing page for details.

Fill out that form and Epic will get in touch with you to negotiate terms for a custom licence.